I went into a bookstore one time when I was 11, and I was trying to find a book a girl lent me at camp, but I only remembered that there was a girl into magic. The guy at the register spent an hour helping me find it, and we did!

(I have forgotten the name by now.)

edit: I said thank you and bought the book

I was a polite little girl

I do not remember the name

I donated the book (and all of my other in-good-condition YA books) to a women's shelter, so hopefully another 11-year-old girl (or boy!) is enjoying it

I walked into a bookstore after WEEKS searching on the web for the first book my mom let me pick out on my own. Thing is, 3 y.o. me was really mad at her for some reason that day and I did not want to pick out a stupid book! I cried all the way home because she made me do so.

That night she tucked me in (me, still very mad) and read me that book. I fucking hated the story. I fucking hated the mouse that starred in it. I fucking hated the colors when she showed me the pictures. I fucking hated that book, period. At the end, my mom kissed me and smiled as she smoothed back my hair. Looking back so many decades later I understand now that her love for me was dancing in her eyes as if to say, "be mad all you want, little man of mine. I can never stop loving you. You are my world".

A lifetime later and I was stoically mourning my mom's death only months earlier when, for no reason I can explain, I remembered that book.

I wanted it. I wanted more than anything else in my life to find it. To see the mouse in it again, to hold the cover, to bring that small part, that tiny memory of her, back into my life.

Weeks on Google. All I could remember were hazy faded images of a mouse. I searched "mouse story" on Google. 2.8 million hits. It wasn't in the first 20 pages of 100 hits-per-page results. I kept trying till one night I furiously slammed my fist on my desk and gave up. I had nothing else to go on. I was unnaturally angry and upset at myself that evening; feeling I'd let her down again, as I'd done more than once when she was still around. I barely got any sleep that night.

A week later and I'm driving past a mom & pop bookstore. With little hope, I went in and bashfully asked the lady at the counter the question that my mind knew was stupid, but had to be said.

"I'm looking for a book. It's about a mouse. I'm so sorry, that's all I remember. Can you help me?" I didn't even tell her why this meant so much to me.

The owner, a nice lady in her 50's, spent an hour helping me. She suddenly turned into a combination of "Monk" and "Sherlock". How old was I now, how old when I read it? Was the book wider than it was tall? What colors in it did I remember? Any other characters that I could remember? Most of the answers to her questions were "I can't remember".

One hour.

She found it. "Scuttle the Stowaway Mouse" by Jean Soule. It had been out of print for decades, but she found a pristine copy of it online, ordered it for me and it got to me 48 hours later. $32 she made on that sale. Not even enough to pay to keep the lights turned on in their shop for a day I bet.

Got home, opened the book, my hands softly running over the cover as if it was my mom's face. I was unashamedly weeping bittersweet tears by the first page. Each word was like a kiss on a mad little 3 y.o. boy's forehead.

Wow. Tears. This is why I love books. The memories, the feels, the everything. I have great memories of books and my dad and they are some of my only happy memories of him, and I spent years creating happy memories with my children using books. Thanks for reminding me how special they are. can't wait to read with my grandchildren.

My mother is still alive and if things go well she'll have another 20 or so years on her, but something she used to do when we were children, when our books got old and we knew the stories by heart, on those long winter nights when it got dark at 3 and all the shops were closed by 5, was to make up Entirely new stories to go along with the pictures, and we loved it. I have a feeling ill remember those nights long after shes gone. Till Im dead probably. God bless her for encouraging creativity in my brother and I.

Exactly this! My children are now outgrowing certain children's book titles, and my husband wants us to get rid of the books. Me? I want to box them up and tuck them away for 15-20 years; then if/when we have grandchildren, we can bring them back out and re-visit our favorites. Rereading them will bring back wonderful memories for both our kids and us.

Please do this. Please. I have a one year old and I'm desperately trying to find some of my childhood favourites for us to read together. My own copies were sold in a yard sale 15 years ago. Don't do that. Keek them all!!

My asshole brother threw all of our old children's book into a ditch on the side of the freeway because he didn't like the clutter. Now he wishes he had all those books for his kids. He could have at least donated them to goodwill. Fucking prick.

Your children will never have the memories online that they can appreciate in the here and now presence of a book; in pages of worn letters and creased paper scenting the room with an ancient musk that flitters in the flickering dust through rays of god that capture the moment timelessly.

Dear gods thank you - I was 100% convinced that in the end you would ask her how much for the book and she would say "tree fiddy" and then the story would go bonkers and we would all regret crying through it. Thank you for being sincere ;-)

Do it. Do it everyday. Let her annoy you with those typical mom questions and concerns. I still have my mom but lost my dad a few years ago. It was sudden and unexpected and I’d give anything to talk to him once more.

... I'm 20 and my dad died in july. I wish I had something that drove me mad to find to remind me of memories with my dad. We had an iffy relationship. I still miss him like fuck though. Tearing up a bit writing this

I'm glad you found your book. And I'm sorry about your mom. For what it's worth I really liked the little window into your life.

Hey, man, I know you've heard it from half the responses on here, but that was an amazing story. And, as someone who lives and works with sweet 'ol laddies like that (Even though they're probably the smartest people in the world,) if you ever get the chance, please tell that bookstore lady thank you. It might seem like an emotional investment to you, but thats only because it will mean so so much more to her if you tell her. Think of it this way, every day you spend pondering what ifs of telling her will become another year where she enjoys the memories of her impact, but only if you tell her. Hell, if her life is lonely enough, your going back in to return the time investment she gave you will mean as much to her as she did to you. But hell yeah man, sorry for the ramble, so bloody glad you found the book, and "what are these fuckin onions?"

I used to own a small bookstore. I second this. We were a literal "mom and pop" shop- just me and my husband. Although we lost a lot of money in the end and were run out of business by Amazon and bigger fish in the sea, the things that I remember the most fondly were the people who were SO happy to find the little hidden treasures we had around the shop.

I remember a woman who found a book on New York fashion in the 60's with full color photos. She fell in love with that book, but wanted to think about the price as it was quite rare and expensive. She went back to the beach house to take a nap and her giddy friends came running back to buy it as a gift. We had to pretend we didn't remember who bought it when she came back in later as they planned to smuggle it back home in their luggage and give it to her for her fiftieth birthday party the following week. They even included a note from us saying we were sorry to lie but that we wanted to be a part of the surprise. They emailed us a photo of her hugging the book and smiling through tears later on. I still have that photo in my file boxes.

There was a young woman I sold a copy of an autographed Martin Luther King Jr book. She couldn't believe the piece of history she was holding in her hands. She held that book with such reverence I almost gave her a discount because I felt the same way about that book.

I sold an autographed Stephen King copy of The Stand to a teenage boy who was practically in tears that he was holding a book touched by his favorite author. I remember he looked at me with wonder on his face and said, "How do you think it got all the way out here to Oregon?" I just said, "Maybe the book was looking for you... needful things, you know." And winked at him. He practically ran out of the store to show his Mom.

I remember all those instances and more. I remember my regulars and their favorite authors. When I hear that a new book is out by one of their favorites, I will still sometimes send them a heads up on Facebook to let them know (some of them are still dear friends even though the shop has been closed for years now and I live in a different state).

Anyway, tell her. She will remember it and it will keep her going to next time someone shoplifts or the next time she sees a day where it's going to be tough to keep the lights on.

I'm so happy to read this. I work in a sheet music/book store and I've gone down these types of rabbit holes with customers before. A couple weeks ago a older guy walked in and all he had was a recording he had made on his phone of the few bars of his favorite childhood piano piece. It was the first piece he had learned, and he wanted t give it to his grandson. I listened to his recording and we went through some books to find it. Eventually he did and he thought I was a hero. That makes up for all of the people who plopped down and ordered me around like their personal shopper for an hour.

I love this story. Thank you very much for sharing. I'm generally not so nice to my mother currently and have been like that for the last few years. I'm always short with her and just kinda rude. I need to be better because she's the only mom I'll ever have!

Yo don’t even apologize. That is one thing that somehow never gets old. Somebody took one of the fiction signs and put it in bibles. Somebody else took the intermediate series sign and put it in bibles.

And the amount of bibles that get stolen... the whole faith point section is like its own reality.

It’s astounding how many are stolen. It’s not even the cheap ones that are easy to get through, it’s the $80 hard back, expensive and stored in a nice box that customers have ripped apart and hidden behind a stack of cheaper bibles.

The Bible aisle is also where most teenagers go to steal stuff. They’ll rip headphones, candy, toys, whatever they want out of the packaging and at night we find a dozen or so packages in the Bible shelves hidden amongst the empty Bible boxes.

Currently rereading Sabriel for the nostalgia. Must’ve been in 6th grade when I read it last and it’s the only book from the middle school library I remember the title of because I had a crush on her. Can’t even remember the names of the real girls I had crushes on back then.

Wizard's Hall by Jane Yolen. Great book. Shy kid sent to wizarding school where he is given the name Thornmallow and has a friend named Tansy. None of his spells work. In the end it turns out he's not a wizard, but he amplifies the power of wizards around him. Written years before Harry Potter. (Edit: added details and link.)

Not OP, but a quick google search suggests Darksword, except the main character has no magic and apparently needs the help of another character called a Catalyst who enhances others magic. I think I may have read like half of the first book ages ago, the name and concept seem vaguely familiar.

Hmm... that might be it but I thought he went to some school or something and it was a big deal he couldn't use magic. That is why I mentioned harry potter. However, maybe I am remembering that part as when he went to join the Technologists? There was something similar with the Catalyst thing though where a person who didn't or wasn't good with magic could increase other magic users power.(or maybe channel it through them more powerfully)

So I'm not a children's librarian, so my knowledge of these books isn't as good as others but let's see...

My first guess is:

The Golden compass Here lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose carefree life among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College is shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors

I'm visiting family right now and don't have wifi otherwise I'd research the heck out of it for you.

But I'll let you in on a secret.

Librarians create "lib guides" to help us quickly find stuff they get asked a lot about. The list I'm going to give you is only one of many. There are also regional guides and we even have guides based on fantasy where the protagonist is gay or a person of color.

So if I'm wrong, I'd go to the popular books by grade, read descriptions and see if I'm closer.

Ok. It is fantasy genre, read it around '95 in Toronto, for pleasure. About a magicians pets, dog, cat, maybe a bird that walk through a mirror. On the other side they can now talk and have to travel through several lands to get back. Each land is a different colour of the rainbow. I think the blue land was an ocean that was actually a giant eye.

How about this one: fantasy genre, read about 2005ish, age 12ish, for pleasure. Had a very interesting magic system based around literally writing spells out in thin air. An example would be golems literally spelled into existence (forgive the pun), making them made of silvery letters that defined their features based upon their component words (ie strength). Then some time in the book the main character who isn't any good at this type of magic (boy in his late teens maybe with dyslexia?) finds another magic system where you tattoo purple incantations onto your skin from which you can use later to pull off of your skin to summon shadow minion things.

If that rings any bells to anyone let me know as I only read the first novel and was interested to see how it ends.

I was that guy once, I went in looking for a series I read as a kid with the only thing I remember was that it was about someone collecting different stones. The workers eyes lit up and with the mightiest voice he could create he shouted “YOU MEAN DELTORA QUEST!?” And god damnit he was right

I work in an electronics parts store, we get people like that almost every day. One of my favorites was the guy looking for an OEM switch for a 1950s Studebaker, who then got incredulous that we, of all people, didn't have it. That's right, sir, our warehouse has got this kind of Mary Poppins/Doctor Who thing going on where we have every electronic part ever made in stock but, you know, the warehouse is the size of a large garage.

I'm highly considering going into this field. I'm a reader by nature, I love learning and just getting lost in books and I like to think my organizational/navigational skills are fairly good. What are the main things you'd say I should consider before thinking about this as a career? The only one I can think of right now is those people that leave books in the wrong place, and having to bring them all back...

Are you thinking a book store or a library? Because I work in a bookstore and I feel like they may be two entirely different jobs. I’ve done both but at the library I was just a student volunteer over the summer and it was a completely different set up.

Working in a bookstore is like any retail store, but you have to deal with ppl turning entire shelves of Mystery books backwards -which is cute the first time until your Manager says you have to turn it around. And then there’s comping (Which is organizing all the books every six months) Which is both fun and tedious because customers and sometimes truck workers just don’t give a fuck where the books go.

the graphic novels section in the store is honestly fucked after being up ten minutes after the store opens.

Clean up sucks during the summer, because there are stacks of books everywhere and we end up taking 2-3 hours to clean the whole store. And there’s the obvious shitty customers.

But that’s the bad stuff. There’s so many good things that come from working in a book store:

Author signings Free books the publishers send before the book is released that are free grabs (first come first serve, there’s usually only 1 copy) Seeing books that haven’t come out before everyone else Being able to check out books for a week before buying them. Helping people find books is so much fun when they have some information. It’s so exciting to see their eyes light up when you find the right one AND you have it in inventory. Giving book recommendations and customers accepting them and buying the book is such a good fucking feeling. It kind of feels like sending a piece of yourself with them but not in a creepy way. Helping kids find a book to read. Introducing Harry Potter to people is so, so good.

I love working at a bookstore. It sucks to close and clean but working during the day it’s a hustle and bustle that’s kind of fun when there aren’t kids destroying the kids section and parents just watching them do it.

But that’s just my take, and I work for a major chain. I’d definitely recommend trying it out, even as just a part time second job.

I have that problem with a song. It was an electronic piece like Axel F. Really up beat, but not as up beat as "Walking on Sunshine". No lyrics that I can recall, and it would have been on Top 40 stations in the mid to late 80s.

I have a vivid memory of sitting in the back seat of my dads car with a girl I liked. My dad was driving us to go skating, and the song came on, and the girl and I talked about animated dancing sunflowers swaying back and forth with the music. I've listened to tons of electronic music from the era and haven't found it yet.

EDIT for reference, this would have been no later than the sumer of 1988.

I read that book in college. I have zero memory of what it was about. It may not have been in college. I think I liked it. I don't remember. I remember the upside down dog. I think someone had autism. Maybe it read like a diary?

I used to work in a video rental shop and we had a hard time maintaining proper alphabetical order in our collection because customers are dicks and kept putting everything out of place. So we starting organizing by color (within genres). Everybody automaticly puts things back in the right order and i now know a lot of dvds by the colour of the cover.

My bookstore experience was that people either knew roughly what they wanted, and could describe it well enough for me to figure it out. Or they had heard of a book on TV or in the news somewhere, and couldn't remember anything except that it "sounded interesting"...Those were actually easy, because you'd have 20-30 people come in in a week all looking for the same book, so you didn't have to think about it.

Way back in the early 1990s on the old bulletin board system I, a newcomer to the whole online thing, once asked what a troll was. The only person to answer said "Your post is a troll." I was confused because I was pretty sure I wasn't trolling and I still didn't know what it meant. I thought about the post off and on for about twenty-five years when it finally hit me recently that I'd been trolled about as well as one can be.

The use of the term trolling refers to the practice, maybe begun or maybe just best popularized, on USENET by the denizens of alt.folklore.urban, the regulars of whom got so sick of having to answer and re-answer (in the days before USENET was commonly searchable) the stupid question about whether POSH stood for "Port Outward, Starboard Home" (it doesn't; it's a retronym) that they began deliberately making mistakes in their posts, obvious ones, in order to lure in the knee-jerk replies of people who obviously take themselves and USENET too seriously for anyone's good. They likened it not to trolls under a bridge, but trolling a fishing line behind a slow-moving boat.

Trolling as it is now known is what was called, in the USENET and pre-USENET days (UUNET), as "flamebait," a post which is basically designed to lure an angry post (a "flame") in response. Weirdly, its inventor is a specific person. Rich Rosen is a Net.Legend, and in the 1980s he was a very prolific poster to UUNET from his account at Bell Labs. He posted so much inflammatory invective on UUNET/USENET that there was some substantial suspicion he was some kind of natural-language robot developed by Bell to increase the data downloaded over phone lines (because UUNET wasn't yet on the internet-- it was still phone-line based, and Bell owned all the lines worth having).

Early 90s, a.f.u was going strong on USENET, and trolling was having its heyday; whoever said that to you probably picked it up there.

Somehow the internet has changed the term "troll" from "making an intentionally offensive or controversial statement to upset people" to "something funny".

I suspect it will only be a few more years until we've just replaced all concepts of humour to just be called trolling. "Did you see Dave Chappelle's new stand up on Netflix? He told a lot of good trolls. His trolling during the encore were some of my favourite troll moments".

Ugh, I hate it when books change their covers to cash in on movies/tv shows. Also, book series that change their cover style half-way through so your set looks mismatched (looking at you, Song of Ice and Fire).

I had a customer ask for “the book about a mouse,” the other clerk was completely stumped. I happened to be walking by at the time and asked if she meant Of Mice and Men. That was what she was looking for and I died a little inside.

i worked in a used bookstore when i was around 18 and this older guy came in looking for a fantasy book series he had read once he could not:

remember the title

author

or book cover

all he could tell me and the store manager(she was showing me something on the tills) was that the character he remembered was "a tall woman with dark hair with a white streak and eyes that changed colour depending on her mood"

even with such a limited description i i told him and the manager i had a very solid idea what the book was so i go down to the basement and dig out David Eddings Belgariad and Malorean series and returned them to the shop floor for him to have a look...

he was very happy as it was the series he was looking for and he bought all 10 books and then asked is we had any more Edddings books...he became a regular customer after this although i never did manage to pull off that little bit of genius again

the reason i had a solid hunch?

i love those books and had just finished re reading them a few days before

I used to work at a media store called F.Y.E. I got a ton of questions about movies and music "with that one guy" or other vague descriptors. I still did my very best to interrogate them into providing additional detail... SOMETHING, ANYTHING.

My shining moment occurred when a lady asked me, "I'm looking for this one movie, but don't remember what it's called. It has old people in it, though." I said, "Cocoon?" Her eyes lit up with an enthusiastic "YES THAT'S IT!" and I set her up with the DVD that had BOTH Cocoon movies on it.

10+ years later, I think of that moment when I'm feeling like I don't do anything right and my current job. :)

That's when you go, "Oh, I could be mistaken. Let's check the computer. The computer says it comes out this fall. But let's go look for it just in case because sometimes the computer isn't updated fast enough."

Then you drag her along with you to search the shelves for a book you know doesn't exist, wasting her time for as long as possible until she gives up and leaves.

This reminds me of the time I went into a library trying to find a series that I'd read one or two of when I was younger but never the whole series.

I was like 10-11 at the time and my only way to describe it was

Like...medieval fighting and battles and stuff but with animals. Like the animals were the ones fighting and people had never been there but the animals acted like people would.

The librarian smiled and led me to the public libraries complete collection of Redwall books which had actual cover art and not sheets of paper to cover up the rather fierce looking rodent holding a sword above a weasel.

I worked in a bookstore for a long time and would get this all the time. After a while, I actually started being able to find the right book on "The cover was blue, and it was about a dog," types of requests just because they were so common (and often about the same books).

I never realized just how much info there was for librarians to learn. My youngest daughter (who is admittedly highly analytical; she is halfway to a dual-majored degree in CSE and EE) worked in our local library part-time; she was expected to basically memorize the whole place.

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